Hunting Down Saddam (6 page)

The stories of torture and murder reminded the Green Berets of the genocide of the Jews in Nazi Germany. This included the infamous poison gas/chemical warfare attacks on entire populations, which were an experiment in the killing effectiveness versus the effort which Saddam's forces wanted or needed to expend. The Kurds were so spooked by their experiences with gas attacks that any white smoke or dust caused them to panic. Lining up the Kurds in front of trenches and shooting them, or telling the Kurds to get into the trenches first, before shooting them, was also a common story. Later, when Kirkuk itself was liberated, one Green Beret described the city as being filled with mass graves.

“Everywhere you went, you were tripping over a mass grave,” he said. The Kurds told the Special Forces that the toll stood at over 250,000 of their people killed by Saddam. At first, the operators thought that number might be inflated, but after seeing the mass graves firsthand, it was easy to agree.

In 1991, after Saddam had beaten down the Kurdish people through “Arabization,” no-man's-land zones were put up between the Kurdish autonomous zones and the borders of the Iraqi regime.

The chance that the Kurds might seek vengeance was a real cause for concern with the Green Berets, so they explained that the United States, and its laws of warfare, did not permit or tolerate such atrocities. The Kurds agreed. On the whole, they did not want to sink to Saddam's level, no matter how terribly they themselves had been treated.

The more the newly arrived Green Berets learned of the Kurdish mind-set and their chief political party in that sector, the PUK, the more they understood. They wanted to take part in anything that was different from the Iraqi regime, and tolerated many different Islamic groups, Socialist groups, labor groups, and myriad others. With all of these parties, it wasn't a true democracy—everybody had a gun, and many ruled by force, but it was as close as they could get. One operator reasoned that perhaps this haphazard governance was why extreme groups like the Ansar al-Islam flourished.

But the PUK had an enemy in Ansar as well, because of the Ansar's desire to get control over the area away from Jalal Talabani, so that they could operate without restrictions as a terrorist base in the region. The PUK had frowned on it, but had done nothing to stop them. Soon, there were car bombs exploding around As-Sulaymaniyah, and Katucha rocket attacks by the Ansar on likely PUK locations. The Ansar would be dealt with severely in less than a week—it would be called Operation VIKING HAMMER and the story is told in this book.

The Kurds of Chamchamal respected the Green Berets immensely once the initial rapport was established. The older Peshmerga chastised the younger fighters by telling them that the Americans came from halfway around the world to fight their fight for them, so they had better be very brave in their presence. Also, they knew the high premium on American lives, and that the Special Forces needed the Kurds to watch their backs. In turn, fathers would instruct their sons to never leave the sides of the Special Operators when in battle.

Many of the Special Operators had already spent a good deal of time with the Kurds during Operation PROVIDE COMFORT during the 1990s, and they knew both the Kurdish people and the stark landscape of northern Iraq very well. The Kurds came to feel that the Green Berets were brothers instead of outsiders.

“Kak Salah,” short for Saladin, was the Kurdish leader in Chamchamal. He was named after a great Kurdish fighter. “Kak” meant “Mister,” but he was a lieutenant colonel as well as a worldly man who spoke Arabic like a true Arab. This was a great skill to have in Iraq as a Kurd so close to the green line.

The first day, one of the PUK commanders told the Green Berets of a particularly brutal incident that had happened at the Iraqi checkpoint not long before the Green Berets arrived. An elderly Kurdish woman (reportedly eighty to ninety years old) approached the Iraqi checkpoint with a can of gasoline she was carrying back to Chamchamal from Kirkuk. Kirkuk is rich in petroleum products, but to the Kurds on the other side of the green line, gasoline was a luxury. The Iraqi soldiers snatched her gasoline can away, and poured the contents over her, igniting it and burning her alive.

When the Green Berets heard of this, they dropped a JDAM (Joint Direct Attack Munitions) on the guard shack, putting the five-hundred-pound bomb right through the roof of the little building during the first air strike the next day. The Iraqis responded with a rocket and artillery attack on the town. A thirteen-year-old boy died in the attack, and a Kurdish woman lost her legs.

The Green Berets responded with “Game on,” and unleashed the full force of the USAF and U.S. Navy aviators on them the day after. Even though the bombing of the guard shack resulted in several Kurdish deaths by retaliatory Iraqi shelling, it showed the Kurds of Chamchamal exactly what the Americans could do. It was not simply a lucky shot. These bombs could land with pinpoint accuracy—nothing the Kurds or the Iraqis could really fathom before seeing it firsthand.

The first day on the rooftop in Chamchamal was spent targeting; the second day was spent calling in aircraft and dropping precision-guided bombs. The rooftop was less than twelve hundred meters from where the bombs were being dropped. The Green Berets could see Iraqi vehicles moving about in ignorant bliss, unaware that many of them would soon be vaporized. Due to the sloping topography, the ridgeline could only be seen from this distance, or from kilometers away, where the land sloped up.

With the satellite imagery and the help of the Kurdish HUMINT, the targets of highest priority were taken out first. High above the earth, the faint vapor trails of a B-52 Stratofortress made such fine white lines in the atmosphere that one had to really squint to take notice. With an altitude of forty-five thousand feet, the nearly invisible heavy bomber let go a slew of twelve JDAM-equipped bombs; each one was locked onto its own target. The Iraqis would never know what hit them.

The Green Berets were calling in air strikes on the bunker systems by the end of their second day in Chamchamal. They operated in split-teams, as they had done in Afghanistan and elsewhere, with a third to a half of an ODA on each shift. That way, the CAS missions could be called in without a break in their devastating torrent, and the men of 3rd Group were never too fatigued to carry out the CAS missions with anything but the deadliest of accuracy.

The Iraqis who were left alive retreated back over the ridgeline and closer to Kirkuk. With the threat that had once been only twelve hundred meters away now on the other side of the mountain, Chamchamal became the new FOB (Forward Operating Base) for 3rd Group, moving down from As-Sulaymaniyah to the new front lines.

The entire Iraqi front collapsed around Kirkuk after four or five days of heavy bombing. Altogether, it was a total of about ten days of dedicated CAS missions, and the Iraqi units were overwhelmed with the intensity. There was no time for them to regroup or think of a strategy—the bombing never ceased, and they could not even fall back in an organized manner. It was “cut and run,” every man for himself as they raced to make it to Kirkuk for a last stand with the Green Berets and the Kurds.

The 3rd SFG ODAs moved toward Kirkuk with thousands of Peshmerga soldiers. At a certain point, one operator commented, they had to finish off the Iraqis with a conventional attack. By this time, Saddam's forces were too few and too scattered to be bombed anymore. “It was like, we bombed them, we bombed them, and we bombed them.… The ones who were left were not giving up, so we knew it was time for a ground assault.”

The Green Berets had planned to perform ground assaults on the Iraqi Army all along—it was standard practice. Once a target is destroyed, the SOP is to clear the objective before continuing onward. But before the Special Operators and their Pesh fighters could get there, the Iraqis who had not been killed in the bombing had already retreated. Only when the last of the die-hards remained, and there was nowhere to retreat, did the Green Berets launch a ground attack.

It wasn't easy for some ODAs, however, and there was some steady resistance among the Iraqis. It was never anything the Green Berets couldn't handle, but rather it was a little surprising, considering that the intelligence they had received had indicated that the Iraqis were ready to give up.

The ground attacks were organized by the Green Berets in what they deemed “textbook Ranger School assaults.” This included two assault lines and at least one support-by-fire position to cover the assaulters while they moved across their objective. The discipline of the Ranger-style strikes eliminated the chance of fratricide among the normally wild Peshmerga, and maximized the chances of success with minimum casualties.

The PUK were broken down into 150 to 200–man assault teams, and mortar teams were organized for support-by-fire positions. The Green Berets supplemented this with vehicle-mounted MK-19 automatic grenade launchers. The Iraqis had never been on the business end of an automatic grenade launcher before, and it “really spooked them,” said one operator. They either ran or stayed in their bunkers until the bunkers were destroyed by CAS. The CAS was provided by “fast movers” as well as a B-1, a B-2, and a B-52 bomber. The B-1 and B-2 flew even higher than the B-52, with nearly invisible contrails. The only way the Green Berets could tell the bomber had dropped its payload was to count the seconds on their watches after the “Bombs Away!” command had been heard over the radios. Almost to the second, the calculations of the Air Force crews matched up with the resultant explosions.

The Iraqis that were captured and became POWs were deathly afraid of the Americans. “They thought we were going to execute them,” one Green Beret recalled.

Kirkuk fell quickly. The city, essentially a military depot because of its strategic importance, was so well equipped that every Kurd was literally driving around in a new army vehicle after the city fell. Everything had been abandoned—hundreds of T-55 and T-72 Russian tanks, ammo depots full of every imaginable weapon and corresponding ammunition, even uniforms. Thousands of Iraqi uniforms lay in heaps in locations all over the city, as the soldiers stripped and melted into the population. This virtual osmosis would play a big part in the insurgency later in the war, pro-Saddam and otherwise.

Operation VIKING HAMMER

Perhaps the largest Special Operations assault in history occurred a stone's throw from the Iranian border, east of As-Sulaymaniyah, the 3rd Special Forces Group's FOB. The massive uphill battle, through rocky, rough terrain and sometimes ankle-deep mud, was done under some of the most intense enemy fire imaginable.

The battle lasted for two days and ended with the destruction of the largest terrorist camp in the world. The incident has remained in the shadows of the war, however, and has received virtually no press coverage at all. Until now, the “Quiet Professionals” of Special Forces have been silent about what may have been the biggest victory in the Global War on Terror since vanquishing the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

On March 28, 2003, at 0600 hours fifty of the Green Berets from 3rd BN, 3rd SFG (A) and between eight to ten thousand Peshmerga fighters moved east along two “prongs,” toward their objective: the secret mountain base of the terrorist organization known as Ansar al-Islam. Intelligence indicated that the area off the roads had been heavily mined—and the Green Berets weren't about to test the accuracy of those reports. Even if the intel turned out to be off, as it often turned out to be, there was no need to venture there unnecessarily.

The fear of treading through minefields kept the Special Operators and their massive Peshmerga force strictly to the roads and mountain trails, where they moved as “ducks in a row” instead of in the wedge-shaped assault formations typically used when engagement with enemy forces is likely or imminent.

The twin prongs of the assault force were broken up into fast-moving advance elements, which could move at a high rate of speed as they engaged the enemy terrorists with assault rifles and light machine guns. The Pesh guerrillas in the lead elements were lightly armed with AK-47s and PKs (Pulemyot Kalashnikova—Russian general-purpose machine guns with between 100 and 200 rounds of ammunition per man). The Green Berets had their M-4 carbines and M-240B SAW (Squad Automatic Weapon) light machine guns, but they were never ones to go easy on the ammo, regardless of how fast they needed to move.

Three hundred meters behind the lead force of each group was the support force: Green Berets in trucks with .50 caliber machine guns and MK-19 belt-fed grenade launchers, and Peshmerga heavy weapons men with ZSU 23mm Soviet anti-aircraft machine guns and mortar tubes on wheeled trailers. On this mission, there was no dedicated CAS, so if there wasn't an aircraft in the area, the Green Berets and their new allies were going to be on their own.

The northern prong included ODA 093, while the southern one, which ran two kilometers south, and parallel to the northern prong, contained the men of ODAs 094 and 095. The fight began just after 0600 hours, as they drew closer to the edge of the mountains. Here, the enemy would always have the high ground, and in the early morning light, the first sporadic bursts of light machine gun fire started to rain down on the advancing Peshmerga—a drizzle at first.

The drizzle quickly turned into a downpour as they drew closer. The fire came from members of Ansar al-Islam, and they were heavily defended. The popping of light machine gun fire turned into the
clang, clang, clang
of 23mm ZSU fire and the
whoosh
of Katucha rockets. The Peshmerga and their Special Forces comrades had no choice but to charge forward up the hill, straight at the terrorists, as the fire rained down around them. Here and there a Kurdish soldier fell on the battlefield.

The support elements began launching their own Katuchas and ZSU fire. Then to that they added the force of the American .50 cals (fifty caliber) and the devastating fire of the MK-19 automatic grenade launchers. The MK-19 is particularly effective because it covers what is known in the military as “dead space”: those areas unseen, such as behind berms or ridges and in low-lying depressions an enemy force may use for potential cover and concealment.